Found this great arti­cle from Bobby van der Sluis: The learn­ing curve of web stan­dards.

I wish all the peo­ple who say that web stan­dards don’t work would read this. Web stan­dards do work, really, it’s just that they require a dif­fer­ent approach. In some ways, it’s prob­a­bly eas­ier for peo­ple who’ve never learnt any old-school html to adapt to a new way of doing things. And learn­ing web stan­dards is not easy, but then, nei­ther was learn­ing table hacks and how to use spacer gifs, if any of us can remem­ber that far back. But it’s worth it in the end.

My first exper­i­ments with web stan­dards started with using css for for­mat­ting. Then, I read an arti­cle about xhtml and decided to take it on board. I hate to admit it, but back then, I didn’t even know about val­i­da­tion. I got some nasty shocks when I found out! The next step was using css for lay­out. This “tran­si­tional” stage took ages — over a year — but even those half-baked attempts at using css for pre­sen­ta­tion or get­ting table lay­outs to val­i­date were streets ahead of my old way of doing things. Things just start to fall into place, markup gets cleaner and eas­ier to main­tain, cross-browser sup­port gets less painful.

So, if you’re think­ing about mak­ing the tran­si­tion, take heart. It’s a jour­ney. Hang in there. Yada yada yada. Don’t look back.